This invention, generally, relates to vehicle simulation and, more particularly, to a new and improved visual system having a unique filter system for a simulator.
In today's high performance aircraft that have become more and more complex, there is a need for more extensive and specialized training. To obtain such training, a student pilot must either be provided with actual training and experience in the aircraft which he is to fly, or he must be provided with training in a simulator of such aircraft.
However, there are certain emergency procedures and maneuvers that simply cannot be accomplished by training in an actual aircraft because of the dangers of the actual real-life environment. This is especially true for maneuvers that involve emergency procedures, which makes training in a simulator of that aircraft particularly advantageous.
Additionally, with the increase in expense of flight fuel in recent years, the time required in training within such an actual aircraft makes that form of training excessively expensive, particularly when taking in consideration with the wear and tear on such an actual aircraft.
Consequently, aircraft simulators are being called upon to take on more and more of the aircraft training missions. For such training to be effective, the aircraft simulator must reproduce faithfully the environment that the trainee would face in an actual flight.
For those aircraft types in which a pilot and a co-pilot view the outside real world through relatively small windows, the visual part of the simulator is accomplished in the past through the use of a suitable Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) positioned at each window. However, a trend today is toward the use of larger screens on which can be projected by projectors images for viewing through the simulator windows, as in an actual aircraft.
In a typical visual system in a simulator today, the projector, the front projection screen, and the trainee are positioned at different locations. Such displacement of the trainee's eye position from the location of the projector produces a condition that is referred to as "off-axis viewing".
Such "off-axis viewing" causes an image location to be different, as perceived by different trainees in different physical locations, such as a pilot trainee and a co-pilot trainee in a simulator. A change in image brightness as a function of viewing angle has been recognized already and has been solved by an invention described and claimed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,354,738 by the present applicant and assigned to the same Assignee as the present invention.
The invention presented herein is for use in a flight simulator visual system for training a pilot and a co-pilot seated side-by-side, wherein the flight simulator uses compound image projectors such that the images viewed by the pilot and the co-pilot may be different, even though the compound images are projected onto the same screen. By providing compound images on a single screen that can discriminate whether a particular scene is viewed by the pilot or by the co-pilot simultaneously, realism can be heightened because of the different eye points that produces in the real world a different point of view and a different perspective that cannot be achieved in single projection systems.